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You've probably been creating bitmap art for years, or even decades. David Karlins thinks it's about time you investigated the possibilities of creating vector drawings. The concepts and terminology are a bit less like working with paint on canvas - but the technology is a lot more powerful.

From the author of

Mastering the Pen Tool

The Pen tool is the most powerful tool in Illustrator. It allows you to
define your own anchor points, as well as adjust the curve associated with those
anchors, simply by manipulating two control points associated with each
anchor.

When you click and hold down the Pen tool icon in the Illustrator toolbox,
the Pen tool flyout displays a set of Pen tools (see Figure 2). We’ll
explore the other tools in the Pen tool flyout later on in this article, when I
show you how to adjust anchors. For now, let’s focus on the Pen tool
itself.

The best way to start using the Pen tool is to generate line segments. Note
that terminology: You generate line segments (paths)—you
don’t draw them. In other words, to create a line, you first define two
anchor points. Resist the intuitive impulse to click and drag!

To generate a straight line with the Pen tool, click once where you want the
line to begin, and then click at the point where you want the line to end.
Additional clicks add more line segments. As you generate anchors, the Pen tool
remains active until you close the path. If the path isn’t closed, you can
add points anywhere in your drawing simply by clicking.

Here are two ways to end a line segment path:

Select another tool, or Command-click (Mac) or Ctrl-click (Windows) anywhere
on your drawing.

You can also end a series of line segments by closing the path. To do this,
move the Pen cursor over the original anchor point and click. As you move the
cursor over the starting anchor point, the cursor displays a circle (see Figure
3).

Figure 3 To close a
path with the Pen tool, move the cursor over the starting anchor point and
click.

Once you’re comfortable creating anchors with the Pen tool, the next
step is learning to control the smoothness of the anchors. By default, the Pen
tool generates sharp-angled anchors, not smooth anchors. After you have more
experience with the Pen tool, you’ll probably define curvature as you
position anchors. But the best way to learn that trick is to divide the process
into two steps. You just learned how to generate anchors; now let’s focus
on how to define the curves associated with those anchors.